


Sea Monsters of London

by Dendritic_Trees, pinkcupboardwitch



Series: Seal Song [3]
Category: Shades of Magic - V. E. Schwab
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Selkies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-12 22:59:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18456356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dendritic_Trees/pseuds/Dendritic_Trees, https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkcupboardwitch/pseuds/pinkcupboardwitch
Summary: Holland has a scary reputation, but at this rate he won't keep it for long.





	Sea Monsters of London

Holland always looks a little small, as a human. He’s not. He’s taller than Vortalis is, broad-shouldered and well fed. But he’s used to thinking of Holland as twelve feet long with two inch long teeth and by comparison, yes, he’s small.

But that aside, he remains remarkably unchanged. Vor has got used to talking to sitting by the water talking to Holland and getting an answer in clicks and sighs. Now he sits in his quarters, or the throne room and talks to Holland, and gets answers back in clicks and sighs. Its not that he can’t speak, its that he doesn’t. He still smells vaguely of seawater. He still yawns when he’s annoyed, its just much less effective without the fangs.

And yet people are just as terrified as ever of him. Vortalis has a well-honed talent for eavesdropping and when people don’t think he’s listening, the word ‘king-eater’ comes out. They carefully never say it to his face. He’s not complaining. He’s getting a lot of use out of Holland’s reputation as London’s resident sea monster.

Vortalis has spent years at sea. He was a captain before he was king. He knows about sea monsters. Every sailor has a different sea monster story. There’s the ones about giant serpents that can coil around a ship. The ones about immense sharks that just swallow them whole. There’s stories about great, sucking vortexes which may or may not be monsters at all, and ones about creatures that are just giant masses of sticky tentacles, like an octopus made of nightmares. His last first mate had told the whole crew over and over about creatures which looked like beautiful women and cursed sailors to run themselves aground. And that wasn’t even counting the stories about sudden giant waves, sudden storms that coated ships with ice or mermaids, which everyone knew preferred human flesh to any other food.

Of course, Vortalis had good reason to like sea monsters, there were enough people who had called him a sea monster over the years, or at least feared the Hunter as much as any mermaid.

And then he came back to London, and London’s own specific sea monster, the selkie who never came ashore and who’s eerie whistling either a good or bad omen, depending on who you asked. But who, everyone agrees, would certainly, certainly eat you if you fell into the harbour. Which is a lot of nonsense.

In fairness, Holland makes a very good sea monster.

Most of the time.

Then there are the times, like now, where instead of waiting for him by sitting in a chair (there are several in the room, they’re all perfectly comfortable), which is what most people would have done, or even on the ground, which would have been the less popular option, he elects to drape himself horizontally across Vor’s bed, with his legs trailing on the ground, fall asleep and make undignified sleepy clicking sounds.

If he keeps this up he’s going to ruin both their reputations.

**Author's Note:**

> [Here we see some leopard seal napping](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI-ksUvc5sg), which I'm sure would look totally normal coming from a person. 
> 
> At 12 feet Holland is actually abnormally large for a male leopard seal, its usually only the females that get that big, but I enjoyed the idea of a 12 foot long seal, more than I enjoyed the idea of a factually accurate fanfic, so here we are.


End file.
